Many leaders lose their way in uncertain times. Find out how you can help your staff find a path through change and difficulty.

Following the shock of Northern Rock and Societe General, a cold wind is beginning to blow across the business world. In such uncertain times leadership challenges become key.

Many leaders become paralyzed by their inability to give clear, far reaching answers about the future and so try to avoid such conversations altogether, or, offer false hope and promises which are rapidly spotted as such by those they seek to reassure. 

Author: Sarah Lewis, managing director, Appreciating Change

Topic: Leadership, change, uncertainty

OVERVIEW

Uncertainty presents such leadership challenges as: how to keep up morale and motivation in an atmosphere of increasing despondency; how to maintain a sense of moving forward when the future is uncertain; how to create hope and optimism in a general atmosphere of pessimism; how to remain pro-active while reacting to events you can’t control; how to keep your best people while they wonder how safe the ship is; how to stay closely attuned to changes in the business environment while focussing on getting the best from your organisation; how to be flexible enough to respond to changing situations while still making plans and doing things; and, how to continue to get the best from people while they are distracted by concerns for their own future.

WHEN TO USE THIS GUIDE

• When the future direction for the business is uncertain or has suddenly lost certainty.

• When people are being asked to be part of the change and the path forward to the goal isn’t clear.

• When you are being asked to offer leadership and you feel you can’t give people the clear answers, direction and certainty about the future that they desire.

10-STEP ACTION PLAN

Demonstrating integrity while creating optimism

1. Don’t feel because you are the leader you must have all the answers.

Recognise that you have a wealth of expertise, intelligence, skill and resource in your organisation to help meet the challenges ahead. Call on it.

2. Develop the ability to act.

'As if’ you knew what to do for the best while at the same time being flexible enough to change tack when new information comes in.

3. Recognise that you have support needs too.

Find someone outside the organisation (a coach for instance) with whom you can have the ‘dark night of the soul’ conversations, don’t burden or scare your staff with these.

4. Always act with integrity.

This demands good judgement about what any particular person or situation requires. For example on occasion you may need to be honest with people that you don’t know for sure what the future holds and that you too have doubts and uncertainties. At the same time you need to be able to create optimism about the future.

Maintaining motivation and morale of the organisation

5. It's important that people feel they are able to shape the situation.

Find ways that people can be pro-active in dealing with the needs of the business and their concerns; engage and involve people as much as possible in making the decisions that can be made.

6. Be prepared to listen.

Listen to people’s concerns about the future and offer what you can to help them feel better. Resist the urge to make reassuring promises you can’t keep.

7. Present choices. 

A sense of choice is very empowering so ensure that people continue to feel that they have choices about what they can do. Act as if they both have a future both inside the company, and out. Ensure they realise that the projects they are doing will increase the likelihood of the company surviving, and, increase their market worth

Work with the human processes of the organisation

8. Communicate.

Recognise that everything you say and do as a leader has meaning for your followers – there is no such thing as a neutral transmission of information or ‘doing nothing’. So make sure you manage the meaning you create by how you communicate and by what you focus on.

9. Offer help. 

Help your people make the most productive and useful sense of what is happening.

10. Recognise and encourage the value of positive emotions – laughter, playfulness, and passion.

Create stories of hope, possibility and good futures that are accepting of current realities.

EXPECTED OUTCOMES | RESULTS  

• Leaders are frequently astonished at how much their staff has to offer if they are asked and equipped to help.

• The staff of a social work organisation that unexpectedly went into receivership continued to come to work to re-house 20 vulnerable families in the last month of the project although it was made quite clear that there was no guarantee they would get paid. This was achieved through the integrity of the leader who was honest about the situation and what was required and also made it clear that she recognised that not everyone would be able to respond to the appeal and that was fine, but please to let her know so she could plan knowing who was available.

• At the pivotal staff meeting in addition to the above she also painted an inspiring and hopeful picture of how this process of sudden and unexpected closure could be a success. And it was.

• You will know if your efforts are working when you experience a sense of loss of control. Things will be happening as people get on with meeting the challenge that you may not be aware of at the start.

• Your role will change from initiating and pushing projects to shaping and co-ordinating what the organisation is offering.

• Employees will reveal hidden talents.

• Employees will be expressing a desire to ‘see things through’ however it turns out because they have a stake in what is being done.

• You will no longer feel alone.

• You will be spending time helping the managers below you to be as brave as you in leading differently.

• Leadership will become a feature of the organisation rather than a formal authority role.

ABOUT APPRECIATING CHANGE

Appreciating Change is a psychology based business consultancy that helps organisations achieve good outcomes from their change initiatives. We are experienced in helping people to change their behaviour, mindset, ways of working, work relationships, communication patterns, and organisational culture. In our work we draw on new knowledge and methodology such as appreciative inquiry, positive psychology and open space technology.

Appreciating Change works in partnership with organisations offering both easily applied products such as our ‘Leading through Change’ and ‘Back to Basics’ development programmes, and exclusively tailored interventions that work on the individual, team and organisational level to achieve change.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Contact: Sarah Lewis
T: 020 8293 0017
E: sarahlewis@appreciatingchange.co.uk
www.Appreciatingchange.co.uk

ADDRESS

Appreciating Change
8 Bellot Gardens
Greenwich
London
SE10 0AL